A great piece from Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman on openness advocates Google now blocking rooted Android devices from its new movie-rental service. You know, those devices people rooted to remove all the crap carriers bundle, to ‘add value’, which is a benefit of Android being ‘open’?

But it serves as yet another example that Android’s openness only extends as far as it benefits Google.

I’m wondering when people will get the hint about this. Everyone whinges about Apple’s walled garden, but it’s pretty clear Google just has a different kind of wall, and one it’s sneakily putting up a brick at a time, hoping no-one’s watching. There is one big difference with Apple, though, as Harry Marks says:

Where’s the outrage? Where are the riots? Where’s the media sensationalisation?

Where indeed? I guess, for some reason that isn’t entirely clear to me, while Apple blocking jailbroken iOS devices from iBooks is evil, Google blocking rooted Android devices from movie rentals is a-OK.

Yeah, Google is doing crappy stuff, but my Android phone is still way more open than my iPhone. On my Android phone, I can hit a checkbox that lets me install apps from outside of the Android app store. On the iPhone, I can’t. If I want to write and run code on an Android phone, all I have to do is open Eclipse, connect the phone to my Mac via USB, and run my code on the phone; that’s it. Not possible with the iPhone. If I want to look at the Android source code because there’s some bug I can’t figure out, I can. Yes, Google is bad at releasing code regularly and on time, but at least, they eventually *do* release their code. Obviously, no such luck with the iPhone.

Is Google perfect? Hell no. Are they more open than Apple? Yes.

If you want to complain about Android, complain about the stuff that’s actually broken, like the shitty user interface. But don’t complain that Google isn’t open enough while using an iPhone.

One last point: people who ask where the outrage is are probably just not paying attention. True, major news outlets aren’t complaining about this as much as they are complaining about some faux Apple scandal (glassgate, anyone?), because complaining about Apple gives them more hits. But Android users actually *are* complaining about it.

I disagree about the equivalency. I never said Apple and Google were the same on this, but that Google is, slowly, (“a brick at a time”) locking down aspects of its OS, despite its claim of openness. I don’t disagree that it remains more open than iOS by some margin, but from the way Google’s acting these days, for how long? And if major services start relying on a device not being rooted, how long before that action is rendered obsolete?

Of course, nothing’s to say this is a bad thing. A more locked-down Android could be a better competitor for iOS in many ways, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what Amazon offers with its upcoming Android devices.